Gaming Daily A-Z

Yoda Soccer Yoda Soccer 0.73 came out at the start of November - looks like that one slipped past most of the open source community. However it looks like 0.73 will be the last release for this Sensible Soccer clone. Whilst they have gone most of the way to recreating the classic game, the limitations of the platform used to create it (the proprietary BlitzMax) means the authors have created a new project, Open World Soccer , which will be a Sensi clone in C++. There is already an alpha release (very alpha) which shows off higher res graphics although not much more. For those people pining for a bit of Sensi nostalgia, try out Yoda Soccer which is relatively complete. The Castle 0.8 is available for download. It's still a bit of a tech demo, but the initial level looks promising. It's nice to see somebody making progress with a single player FPS game, although there is still a long way to go with this one. Dream Chess Dream Chess 0.2 is pretty amazing as far as chess g...

Glest has carried the accolade of being a leading open source game due to the relatively polished nature of it's graphics at the time of release a few years ago. Since then, sadly, the development pace has not matched the original hype surrounding the game. For the first time in quite a while, there's a major development push. This time, the emphasis is on making it multiplayer . There's a windows binary patch, and the code is in SVN for other OS users, although is largely untested on anything other than Windows. Also released today was Star Ship Troopers: Last Defense 2 , a mod for Glest. Updated models can be seen in this thread . The download is a whopping 130mb so there's plenty of new content to chew over in there. That's a lot of Glest goodness. Enjoy!

I had an opportunity the other day to do some game playing with my son - so I had the constraint that the games had to be playable by a 7 year old, meaning favourites of mine like Fish Fillets were generally ruled out. First up was the ever-popular Super Tux . The young lad was an experienced campaigner at this so it didn't hold his attention for too long. However, whilst we were playing, I did notice a number of things that I think need addressing in the game: Complete lack of originality They have copied Mario down to the core. It's a clone with different graphics. Every Mario aspect (gameplay, enemies, etc) has a "skinned" equivalent in Super Tux. Really, it's one thing to be inspired by another game, but to clone it down to the last detail? I don't know, maybe I'm being harsh (after all, I'm a Freeciv fan) but I feel there's a big room for improvement in this regard. I especially don't like the fire flower; can't we come up wit...

Like a time machine, I go back to the days when Free Gamer brought you new games and exciting updates, bound together with poetic abandon that would make a scholar proud. Open Football The coveted Free Three Dee football game, Open Football , continues to grow. Like Wembley , a spectacular scene that so many doubted would ever come to full fruition, the developers battle on in their audacious endeavour and, against all odds, the project plods forward at a steady pace. Cast your eyes upon the first screenshot to show more than one player on a pitch! Not much, say ye? Nay, but more than those before it, and so continues the goal of creating a football game that isn't rubbish to play. Oh and they show off Mac/Win versions in addition to the existing Linux screenshots. What ho? A foe? Or could it be an ambitious open source single player RPG project that looks like it will go somewhere? Radakan , brought to my attention via a wandering adventurer in the local tavern , but art...

Mars: Land of No Mercy , it was looking dead, but it's back! The website is back online and hopefully so is development. I would point out that it was always available on Sourceforge but an offline website can be a death knell for an open source game, so it's good to see things running again. Ad Infinitum Ad Infinitum , a 2D space strategy game that looks very promising although is very early on in development and, other than the Sourceforge project page, doesn't have a website yet. It is also currently Windows only (Linux support done using WINE) but it is licensed under the GPL so there's always a hope that will change. Whilst there's a few online space strategy games, there's not too many singleplayer Free Software space strategy games out there ( FreeOrion and ?) so I hope to see this one establish itself. There's alpha releases available for download. A3DX There's a new 3D artillery battle game about, called A3DX . The website, like the game...

I have a few things to do - notably: Integerate the planet feed Integrate the announcements feed Integrate the forum feed Organise another interview or two Finish my half finished articles that are steadily building as a backlog of drafts We have all this shiney new infrastructure after some brilliant work by notably Ghoulsblade and Hagish, and I'm dragging my toes including it. Sorry guys! The planet and the announcements really could get included in any site which would really help to push Free Game development to another level in terms of being accessible and reaching it's audience with minimum effort. On the Free game side of things, my multiple commitments (notably work and Fortress which I'm trying to get the codebase moving properly) mean I'm not really following the open source game scene as closely as I used to. Silver Tree The open source RPG scene is looking quite healthy at the moment. Silver Tree is shaping up well and seems to be shifting away from ...